Restless Minds
by Pyrasaur
Summary: It's amazing what caring can make a person capable of. Oneshot, mild RobRae.


Nighttime's quiet was thick around her, dark energies buoying her up above the bedsheets and fanning her indigo cloak. Three arcane words slipped from her lips over and over, her familiar habit of meditation, stilling rogue thoughts and worries and -- gods forbid -- feelings.

It wasn't going to work tonight, though.

Raven had known what she was doing when her soulself flitted through the ventilation shafts, finding and entering the Boy Wonder's tortured mind. It was necessary, that irreversible bond: small consequence for saving her friend. The room around her faded, body relaxed and power steady, her awareness sharpening and turning inward. Anxiety was easy to purge from her mind. So were the concern and the anger. Those were all stuffed into the neat little black box, where she kept all the dangerous things she felt. What she wasn't used to dealing with was..._Robin's_ feelings.

At first, all she had felt was the pain in him. Bruises and breaks and fatigue all over, tension screaming through his limbs and clenching his fists, heart pounding at his chest like a terrified animal savaging the cage that holds it -- and then he realized she was there. Recognition spread, a little happiness on top of hard-churning fear and hate. And then he let her in, took a calming breath and allowed her to slip in and see what he saw. And...there were just so many _more_ feelings, she found as she heard blood not her own pound in her ears. Not just the immediate feelings, the massive ones threatening to crush poor spite-blinded Robin, but the thousands of little feelings on every facet of his life. Of course he was like that. He had never needed to stifle his very emotions. Most people didn't.

But... Where her countless object-bonds were stoic in her, that human bond _sang_, resonated in her. She had seen everything, Robin's dreams and fears and wants, she knew them now so fully and clearly. And under a lacy-dread shroud of _only I can stop Slade_, his sentiments for his teammates stood like great spires in his mind, glittering with respect and pride: faith in Cyborg's solid strength, amusement at Beast Boy's candid charm, fondness of Starfire's sweet naïveté, and...

Concern for Raven. He didn't like to see her so quiet and cold. He wanted to attack her dark inner walls, with his fists and his staff and all of his gadgets and break them like he'd broken a thousand other oppressors, and set her free.

No one had cared about her like that before. Maybe--

Azarath Metrion Zinthos. Back into the little black box with it.

Time passed unnoticed around her, until faint nameless emotions stirred; they weren't hers. The gentle tap of knuckles sounded on her bedroom door.

"Raven...? Are you awake?"

Of course he would seek her out... Robin didn't leave things unresolved. She knew that.

She opened the door far enough to gaze impassively out, and there he was, in the strangely routine way that they met through that opening.

"What did you do earlier?" The leader tone was gone -- he was less steel and fire now than calm intelligence. The uniform he wore was a fresh one, his injuries had vanished under the cover of pale bandage, but he couldn't quite rid himself of the day's soreness and it showed in the set of his mouth and furrow of his brow.

"...You should be resting."

"I'm fine. Just tell me, what did you do?"

Typical of him. Robin-feelings flickered restlessly. With an all but silent sigh, Raven turned from the door. "Come in."

Returning to her meditation place, folding her hands in her lap with great calm, she cast him an even look. Robin returned it, sitting on the bed and crossing his lean legs the way she did, settling in for whatever revelation was in store. She had brushed against a half-forgotten memory while in his mind, a glimpse of storm-coloured eyes, serious ones now shielded by the luminous white of the mask. Terribly poetic.

With a breath to compose herself, Raven began. "My powers have consequences, Robin. Everything I touch with them becomes a part of me, and I become part of it, but what I did earlier was..."

"Something more?"

Why had she thought he wouldn't know? "What you felt was my soulself. And by seeing through your eyes, I created a bond between us."

He frowned a little, which meant he was thinking. The Robin-feelings drew strength from his presence and they had names now: surprise, understanding, apprehension.

"So that means--"

"We hear each other, feel each other, know deep secrets..." And with finality, "_Bonded_."

He thought. Raven could sense his systematic thought process picking at every angle of the information.

"...Bonded."

And he took her hand in his own. With that contact, everything came rushing in, all the heavy significance of melding minds and the wealth of his unbridled emotions. The things that he took for granted ran warm through her and Raven suddenly wondered how much of her buried self was radiating back to him. None of the dangerous things, those were firmly locked away, but... He wanted to know. Gentle concern glowed. He concerned himself with _everything_, with people and issues and problems and what remained to be done, how it all reflected on his own life and being, an endless itinerary flashing by and being checked off with bits of himself. He..._cared_.

That was how Robin had survived stress that no human should have; he was used to taking on so much. He was used to thinking and feeling and caring long after it had begun to hurt. That was what a good leader did, after all.

The thinking frown turned to a smile, that little wry smile that made something in her escape the box and tremble.

"I trust you."

He did. There was calm acceptance and something wonderfully soft, it ran over the trembling thing like gentle fingertips. This was right, it was going to be alright. Her lips quivered into a smile of her own.

"I know."


End file.
